10 things you didn’t know about the Internet

The internet has become such an integral part of our lives that we sometimes forget that once upon a time there was a time when the internet did not exist.

The origins of the Internet actually reach back to the 1960s when the United States funded research projects of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks. Today the Internet is a worldwide system of computer networks. A network of networks in which users at any one computer can, if they have permission, get information from any other computer (and sometimes talk directly to users at other computers). It truly has come a long way.

Here are 10 things you didn’t know about the Internet:

There are about 1.8 billion internet users in the world today. (32 countries in the world with more than 10 million Internet users).

China (420 million users), the United States (234 million users), Japan (99 million users), India (81 million users) and Brazil (72 million users) make up the top 5 list of countries with the most internet users. There are currently more than 5 million internet users in South Africa.

Out of the top 20 countries, the five with the highest Internet penetration (not users) are the United Kingdom (82.5%), South Korea (81.1%), Germany (79.1%), Japan (78.2%), United States (76.3%). Internet penetration can be defined as the act of entering into the internet market.

90 trillion e-mail messages were sent over the Internet in 2009.

There are 126 million blogs on the internet.

The popular social networking website Facebook has more than 500 million users.

2 billion videos are streamed per day on the popular video sharing website YouTube.

More than 10 billion tweets have been sent on the micro-blogging service Twitter since 2006.

According to a study in February of this year there are 34,000 Google searches per second (that’s 2 million per minute, 121 million per hour and 3 billion per day).

According to another study in December 2009 there are 234 million websites on the internet (47 million new websites were added on the in 2009).

We hope that you’ve found this information interesting and useful. Please feel free to share this information with your friends. Feedback on this post is welcome.